Poison Blob Seen As Ecology Disaster

December 15, 1985|Cox News Service

WASHINGTON — A mysterious ``blob`` of toxic chemicals discovered on the floor of the St. Clair River between the United States and Canada in November may be the precursor of the worst hazardous waste problem ever seen in North America, a Canadian government scientist says.

The scientist, Daryl Cowell, was immediately rebuked by his superiors in the Canadian Environment Ministry who said he had neither the authority nor the competence to make such a statement.

Cowell`s expertise is in the area of underground water movement. His concern was that billions of gallons of toxic waste had been injected into deep wells in the area where the blob appeared.

In fact, Dow Chemical Corp., the only known manufacturer of some of the substances the blob has been found to contain, operated until last year a deep well disposal system by the river and pumped more than 10 million gallons of waste into an underground salt cavern.

Meanwhile, officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) here are nervously watching Canada`s efforts to deal with the toxic blob as if, like Cowell, they fear a new generation of environmental nightmare.

Behind the concern is ``deep well injection,`` a widely practiced method of getting rid of chemical and petroleum industry wastes.

Some naturalists are concerned that while developing countries struggle with such issues as desertification and deforestation, industrial societies could be fashioning their own environmental disasters by pumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into poorly understood geological formations deep beneath the Earth`s surface.

The least regulated of several disposal options, deep well injection also is the least expensive and most widely used.

Substances thought to be safely out of the way in a cavern hundreds or several thousand feet deep have suddenly appeared in rivers, lakes and water wells at distances from the original disposal site that left regulators not only perplexed but worried.